Asbestos Blues: Labour, Capital, Physicians, and the State in South Africa

HEALTH AND DISEASE Jock McCulloch., Asbestos Blues: Labour, Capital, Physicians, and the State in South Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. 252 pp. Map. Photographs. Tables. Bibliography. Index. $49. 95. Cloth. $22. 95. Paper.

For much of the twentieth century, South Africa was a major producer of asbestos, especially of crocidolite and amosite, which are found in few other regions of the world. Because the mining, milling, and manufacture of asbestos were almost completely unregulated, South Africans who were exposed either in the work setting or through contamination of the environment are now plagued by a largely invisible epidemic of asbestos-related diseases. In Asbestos Blues: Labour, Capital, Physicians, and the State in South Africa, the Australian historian Jock McCulloch makes an important and timely contribution to uncovering the roots of this epidemic.

After major expansions during both world wars, the asbestos industry went into an abrupt decline worldwide in the mid-1970s as the health hazards of asbestos were made public in lawsuits filed in the U. S. and Europe. However, the asbestos industry was able to survive in South Africa until 2000 by establishing new markets in the Middle East, India, and Japan. As McCulloch argues, the survival of the industry in South Africa can be understood only in the context of South African segregationist policies. Key aspects of this context discussed in Asbestos Blues are land policies, high labor turnover, migrant labor, high mortality of Africans, and systematic practices of sending sick workers home to die, as well as collusion among industry, scientists, and the state to suppress scientific knowledge about the health risk of asbestos.

While numerous exposés of the global asbestos industry have been published, McCulloch's book is the first to focus on South Africa. He makes a compelling case that asbestos mining was largely an informal system of production in South Africa until the 1950s and that certain aspects of the production process remained so even into the later decades of the twentieth century. Small mining sites with primarily African labor were controlled by individual white overseers, called tributors, a distinctly different model of mining from that of other industries. Fiber obtained from tributors was then sold to multinational companies, most of them British-owned. African men, women, and children worked under appalling conditions, without service contracts, medical care, housing rations, or any governmental regulation of exposure. McCulloch argues that this informal system appealed to industry and workers alike. For industry, tributors and laborers bore the full risk of fluctuating world markets; for African workers, asbestos mining provided one of the only options allowing them to work and live with their families.

As McCulloch shows, asbestos mining was also unique in that women and children were essential to both production and profit. Banded ironstone, in which asbestos fibers were embedded, was highly destructive of machinery. Therefore, extraction of fiber from the host rock was done by women at the mine sites in a process called cobbing. Children frequently bagged loose asbestos. Cobbing and bagging involved intensive exposure to dry airborne asbestos, but because women and children were rarely registered as miners, the extent of their disease was and remains poorly documented.

In addition to revealing this uniquely exploitative system of labor, McCulloch posits that the epidemic of asbestos-related disease in South Africa is a direct consequence of the complex alliances among scientific researchers in South Africa and Britain, the multinational asbestos industry, and the South African government to suppress medical knowledge about asbestos. Indeed, South African researchers were the first to publish in 1960 the causal relationship between asbestos and mesothelioma. Yet only a few years after this association was reported, the findings from a major survey conducted by the South African Pneumoconiosis Research Unit were suppressed under industry pressure.

Through painstaking archival work and extensive interviews with a wide range of informants, including villagers, former asbestos miners, government officials, mine and mill operators and supervisors, and scientific researchers, McCulloch illustrates the ways in which the global asbestos industry exploited local conditions to generate profits. For South Africans, industrial practices produced a particularly severe epidemic of disease. This fascinating book will be of great interest to Africanists, researchers interested in the history of occupational health, trade unionists, and community-based activists working to hold the asbestos industry accountable.

Lundy Braun

Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

Copyright African Studies Association Apr 2003
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